The Biggest Shell Programs in the World · oils-for-unix/oils Wiki · GitHub

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What programs should be listed? I’m using “biggest” in the sense of substantial, not necessarily the raw number of lines.

• Hand-written shell scripts. There are many big autoconf-generated scripts, like the 70K-line coreutils script, but I don’t consider them substantial in this sense.
• Shell programs that use data structures and algorithms.
  • As a counterexample, bash-completion is pretty sophisticated, but it’s also repetitive because it has a relatively simple function for every command on a Unix machine.
• Shell programs that are over 5K lines (though there may be exceptions). The biggest shell programs that aren’t repetitive tend to be in the 10K+ line range. I haven’t seen any programs over 100K lines.

• akinomyoga/ble.sh — 61K LoC (46K SLoC) in total. Bash Line Editor—fish-like interactive line editor in pure bash! The main file out/ble.sh has 30K lines of code (23K SLoC), but there are 60K+ lines of code in the repo in total. There are many comments (in Japanese).
  • How Interactive Shells Work has a nice overview of how ble.sh works. It’s very sophisticated, using bind -x to read raw bytes from the terminal, decoding those itself in mulitiple explicit state machines, maintaining a drawing buffer, updating the buffer, etc. It has timing and “fibers”, etc.
  • This comment on issue 663 has details on the shell parser! I think this is one of the most sophisticated uses of data structures in shell I’ve seen.
  • We are trying to run ble.sh under Oil. It mostly parses.
  • First commit in 2015 with 8K LoC / 6 SLoC. The actual development has started in 2013.
• bashdb, the bash debugger. ~14K lines of bash. Interesting history: Implementing Debuggers
• drwetter/testssl.sh — 21K lines of bash in a single file! Appears to be hand-written. History: Back in 2006 it started with a few openssl commands…. (Hit issue #606 parsing it.)
• Simplenetes: Kubernetes in 17K lines of Shell. Amazing! But seems dormant. Hacker News Thread.

• rkhunter (official site) — 21K lines of Bourne shell written from 2003-2018!
• romkatv/powerlevel10k — 12K lines of zsh scripts in the directory internal/. There are other 8K lines of configs and helper scripts. First commit in 2014.
• dylanaraps/neofetch — 10K lines of bash 3.2. Displays system information. May also do something interesting with images (?)

• xwmx/nb — 24K LoC (19K SLoC) of bash in nb itself. An additional 86K LoC (55K SLoC) if we count bats tests as bash.
  • First commit in 2014, but active commit history starts in early 2016.
• distrobox — over 7k lines of bash script. Use any linux distribution inside your terminal.
• acme.sh — 7K lines of shell script. Issues and renews certificates.
• inxi 2.3.56 [obsolete] — 16K lines of bash. A fork of infobash in 2008 (889 lines then). infobash has started in 2005. From v2.9, inxi is replaced by the Perl implementation.

• bashforth — At ~3800 lines this isn’t huge, but it apparently implements a real programming language. It has a lot of whitespace and comments.
• vegardit/bash-funk — 27K LoC (24K SLoC) in total. A Bash library. The first commit in May, 2017 (with 10K LoC / 8K SLoC).

• modernish is a portable shell dialect written in shell
• bats is a DSL for writing tests. Generates bash code.
• bashible is an Ansible-like DSL in bash. comments
• clash is an object oriented framework compatible with any modern POSIX shell.
• bash Infinity is a standard library and a boilerplate framework for bash.

• Alpine, Aboriginal, Debian scripts — see blog post
• Completion scripts are big, but often repetitive.
  • _git Zsh completion — 8.3k lines of code
  • git-completion.bash
  • Docker completion
• dyne/Tomb is a ~3500 line zsh script.
• Basalt — a full-featured package manager in pure Bash (est. ~2021). Although it’s only a few thousand lines, there’s already a rich ecosystem (15+ apps/libs) that includes many thousand more lines. Some Bash libraries include (at various stages of development):
  • bash-core, a library for enhancing the trap and shopt builtins, adding stacktraces, and many essential amenities
  • bash-object, a library for constructing arbitrarily nested data structures in pure Bash (nearly 200 tests)
  • bash-json, a library for parsing and printing JSON in pure Bash